Being a live distro, you can also boot pfsense from a USB memorystick or a compact flash card.

No moving parts at all....

I have a perfectly good 6 year old pc that was my wife's college computer. Take out the HD - load the CD - put confix xml file to floppy and you have a router.

And what is a router anyway? It's a computer.

Routers are more stable with fewer moving parts and flash memory instead of a disk which if it goes down uncleanly will need to be FSCK'd before its back up and running. That's the good reason most organizations don't use a computer as a gateway. In reality unless it has a RAID drives and redundant power supplies then it will tend to cause more problems. I would prefer to use a nice Cisco router with IOS any day of the week over a Unix gateway like Firewall-1.

There is nothing wrong with using a linux box as a firewall or router but there will be times you are troubleshooting it. It's an economics decision if you have the time and patience it will work fine.

PFsense boots from CD ROM - it's a live version - nothing to fsck because it doesn't require a hard drive.

Looking forward to reading about your experience with a pfsense router

First result a bit disappointing, the BSD operating system doesn't agree with the Via C3 cpu I have in the box I wanted to use...

Ah, too bad -- but don't give up!